“VOF Week 2 :( Are women really another asset?)”

The untold and unheard live experiences of women remain physically latent to society but, psychologically dominant within children and girls who often leave them with their mothers and neighbours. The story below pricked my heart and passion for women while guiding my path to Web 2.0.

Born and reared in a rural community in Cameroon, I understood that, it was just normal for men to beat their wives. Nobody EVER objects Papa. This was my life style till early as eight years, when I witnessed a man use his hands to off root a bunch of hair from his wave’s head leaving a big bleeding wound. This serious beating resulted from a quarrel when the man asked her for money to take to his concubine and she objected. He said

“If it pains you enough, bring your own concubine. Is the land on which you cultivated the crops for which, I now ask the money yours? Aren’t you even privilege that I let you farm on my land? Your friends go out, rent land, farm and still give a share of their harvest to their husbands”. Speechless and voiceless she stood with a crowd of us jarring at her.

My heart bled in pain while the wound scared me the more but, how could I help the situation apart from joining her to cry? Her old mother said “my daughter, that’s our plight, what can you do? Even if you report to the village council, they will favour him because women NEVER own asset. We are their assets”.

This brutality and others like pregnant women losing their lives after such beatings so much traumatised me that I vowed to become a medical doctor and help treat all such women. Simultenously, I enrolled for judo training such as to torture my husband when he dares that nonsense. This highly restricted freedom of speech and unfriendly environment made me to start thinking for ways to help many more women. This broader dream made me deviate from medicine to rural sociology in the university.

Latter, I founded the Rural Women Centre for Education to combat this but, limited by structure and negligence about issues of violence against women in my country Cameroon, I started searching for social networks where collectively, we could speak out these issues. I subscribe to the UNIFEM say NO to violence against women campaign. While searching further, for where, to further speak up against this inhuman cruelty against women and girls, I found Web 2.0 that I today consider my ideal channel of speaking up.

The story/journey I just related above fits into my personal vision in that, through this interactive media communication, I can further relate my experiences with women which together with other participants experiences could form more substantial evidence for campaigns and petitions of violence against women while empowering others too to speak up the abnormal that like I, they think it’s normal.